The Jewels of Paradise Paperback Author: Visit Amazon's Donna Leon Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0802120652 | Format: PDF, EPUB
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Review
Fascinating.
her first stand-alone
boasts the same sensitivity to human behavior that distinguishes her Guido Brunetti series.”Bill Ott, Booklist
A veteran mystery maven weaves present-day Venice into a 300-year-old puzzle in this engaging stand-alone.
[The Jewels of Paradise] packs the charms of Venice into a smart whodunit.”Kirkus Reviews
While it is undeniable strange to be wandering through Venice without the protection of Brunetti’s solid presence, the young heroine of this novel is so winning that readers should find themselves forgiving the Commissario his absence.
The Jewels of Paradise is as much a tale about a young woman wising up and learning to fight more effectively for her own happiness as it is a mysterythough the centuries-old secrets that those chests contain are also pretty compelling. Commissario Brunetti is allowed to take a vacation once in a while, but only if his replacements are as wry and erudite as Caterina.”Maureen Corrigan, The Washington Post
The Jewels of Paradise... shares some features of the Brunetti mysteriesVenice’s mash-up of high and low culture, corrupt businessmen and Italian-style family squabbles. It also shares Leon’s elegant prose, with humorous, wonderfully detailed descriptions as seen through the eyes of her heroine.”Jennifer Melick, Opera News
About the Author
Donna Leon is the author of the international best-selling Commissario Guido Brunetti series. The winner of the CWA Macallan Silver Dagger for Fiction, among other awards, Leon was born in New Jersey and has lived in Venice for thirty years.
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- Paperback: 256 pages
- Publisher: Grove Press (October 8, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0802120652
- ISBN-13: 978-0802120656
- Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
- Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
I love Donna Leon's books. I've loved them for 20+ years. And I was delighted that there was going to be a new character, a woman. Paola Falier is a character of/from whom I never see/hear enough -- mordant wit personified.
Caterina is no Paola Falier. She is the oddest combination of experience and cluelessness. She swans around various digital databases, but evidently can't imagine setting up the Italian equivalent of a gmail account. She loves Venice but conveys this with the catch-phrase "ridiculous beauty," substituting oxymoron for visual detail. What a cheat. And her voyeuristic interest in the family across from her window -- although it fits with her obsession about children -- verges on the deeply disturbing.
But _geeze_. This isn't a book; it's an outline. Certainly Leon knows the first rule of storytelling -- show, don't simply tell -- but she ignores it here. The composers >>> music get some detail, but not the living people. Venice -- even Venice! -- gets short-changed. We are told how ugly Manchester is, but there's not one single specific, not even about the rain. Ditto the food. The faculty dinner party at the beginning promised to be hysterical, but the author flipped us off with a few adjectives and an epithet or two.
The plot is an excuse for the music, and that would be OK if there were actually a plot; instead it's a collection of improbable circumstances. Things happen for 200 pages and then a thin, thin plot-let shimmers across the few remaining pages then things stop. I have two questions: if one famously rich and powerful branch of the Roman Church had the trunks for centuries and an even more powerful branch is backing this undertaking, why on earth do they need the farce of hiring a musicologist with 5 languages?
As someone who loves (and knows more than a bit about) Baroque opera and who had thoroughly enjoyed all of Donna Leon's wonderful Inspector Brunetti books set in Venice, I was primed to read this new Leon tome. No, I wasn't expecting a Brunetti character equivalent in the world of musicology. But I was expecting the character enchantment and engagement that I had from the first pages of the very first Brunetti book.
Fifty pages in and I was asking myself how it was possible that this book was written by the same Leon who wrote the Brunetti books. The sentence structure, the style, the use of Italian phrasing (that required me to stop and look up the meaning as Leon provided none nor a context), the heavy-handedness with the research aspects of the storyline...the lack of interesting characters, particularly the main one, Caterina. I simply could not believe that this was written by the same writer who created and grew Brunetti. The same author who brought both ancient and contemporary Venice to life and explored a whole range of topics within the Brunetti series. And who made us feel as if we personally knew both Brunetti's work and real families. Vivid, interesting and never boring characters. (If you've read the Brunetti books, you know how well Leon handles the whole exploration of literature in them whether it's a discussion with Paola, Brunetti's literature professor wife, or Brunetti's own musings on various books. This is a marked contrast to how the music history bits are handled in this book. Night and day of difference and not in a good way.)
The theme of Baroque opera--including its history--could have been explored with a lot more intrigue especially in the hands of someone like Leon.
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